Early Stirrings of Religious Life Online

How did we get here? What is the origin of religion online? It might come as a surprise that 2008 marked a twenty-five-year anniversary of religion online. "We tend to think of it as something new, forgetting there is a history of people doing religion online for two or even three decades," said Heidi Campbell, whose book Exploring Religious Communities Online offers a brief history of religion and the Internet and how the two have evolved together.

The Internet began as a Cold War-era project of the U.S. Department of Defense, linking computers together through a new technology called packet switching. When it first went live in late 1969, the ARPANET, as it was known, connected only four university-based nodes, all located on the West Coast. The first e-mail was sent in 1970. Wrote Campbell: "The ARPANET mail system was intended to facilitate research activities, yet users quickly saw that email was a fast and easy way to communicate with coworkers. Correspondence quickly became group conversations as mail and news became the primary motivations for network use." In other words, the social impulse immediately asserted itself.

Heavy e-mail traffic strained the system, and in 1975 the first moderated e-mail group, or Message Service Group (MsgGroup), was set up to develop solutions and standards for e-mail communications. In the late 1970s ARPANET users, all of whom at that time were researchers, used that same format to create groups for non-work-related interest, the first being "SF-LOVERS," for science fiction fans. New operating systems joined the network at that time, including UNIX, and a new program called "newsgroups" gave birth to online discussion groups. In 1983, the group net.religion became the first organized online venue for religion, followed by the creation of net.religion.jewish in 1984. That same year the first denominational foray came from the United Methodist Church, which started CAMNET, a forerunner of the long-running Ecunet.org online community.

What followed from these early e-mailed discussion groups was a flowering of online religious expression, as individuals, congregations, and other religious groups began to establish a digital presence. Often, the creators of these new resources underestimated the popularity of new online religious services. Campbell pointed to the Catholic Church-created website based around the visit to the United States of Pope John Paul II in 1995, which included a venue for people to e-mail prayer requests to the pope. "They thought maybe a couple hundred people would respond," said Campbell. "Within a day, the site was completely jam-packed and they had to remove that function. Neither the Church nor the Web designers knew how popular that was going to be, or how much people wanted to be in touch [with the pope.]"

Often, early efforts were simply about getting information online. Campbell pointed to the site VirtualJerusalem.com, which first went live in 1997. The site offered Jewish people a range of services, including information about local prayer times and kosher food, as well as a live camera of the Western Wall in Jerusalem and rudimentary social networking features like chat rooms. Many of those features, now updated, continue on the site today, including the option of typing in a prayer that will be printed by volunteers in Jerusalem and inserted into the cracks of the ancient stones in the Western Wall.

Early congregational websites included similar types of features: prayer times, contact information, and often some way to send prayer requests. In broadcasting information to a general and unidentified public, aspects of these sites are now labeled, with hindsight, Web 1.0.